Every time PlayStation does a State of Play, I inevitably roll my eyes at howfamiliareverything looks. I have receipts, likethis article from last Maywhere I complained about how boring everything was – they all looked like variations on existing games, and also fairly similar to each other.
I was bored then, and I also was bored at 6am, when I watched the most recent State of Play in bed on my phone, fighting the urge to just go back to sleep because most of what I was seeing felt like a whole lot of nothing.
Okay, Some Of It Was Cool
In the spirit of fairness, this State of Play did have quite a bit of new IP, though we’d already seen announcements for a few of them. Some of them even looked pretty cool. I was immediately intoDarwin’s Paradox!, a puzzle platformer with astonishingly beautiful animation and backgrounds where you play an octopus who can climb almost any surface, camouflage himself to hide, and shoot ink to escape enemies.
Dreams of Anotherhas you shooting to rebuild the world around you, and it has an unconventional visual direction on top of that.I’m already obsessed with The Midnight Walk’s claymation style, though I’ll probably never play it because I’m too scared.Split Fictionlooked awesome, as usual, but we’ve already seen quite a lot of it.
And whileSaroslooks like typical triple-A fare, style-wise, I was immediately able to identify it as a Housemarque game despite never having playedReturnal. That’s a mark of distinctive visual identity, if nothing else, but underlines the predictability of Sony’s stable.
I also enjoy Rahul Kohli in general, and Iloveto see Indian protagonists in big-bill games.
New IP, Same Aesthetic
But the rest of the new IP left a lot to be desired. It all just felt like more of the same stuff we’ve always gotten.Hell Is Us?Death Stranding vibes, which isn’tthatbad, but still.Lost Soul Aside? Typical fantasy sci-fi stuff – big dragon-like creature, a load of familiar-looking environments, big swords.Metal Edenlooks like a cross between Mass Effect and Halo.Mindseyeis uh, sci-fi Call of Duty with Grand Theft Auto driving, maybe?
And while a lot of people have gotten very excited aboutTides of Annihilation’s reveal, I have to say, I found it horribly boring. I love Jennifer English as much as the next person, but there was nothing about the game I found particularly interesting apart from its setting in a magical, destroyed London.
Maybe I’m too cynical. I’m just sick of the same depressing, gloomy environments, the dark fantasy vibes, the big explosions, the glowing swords, thephotorealism. I want something that looks different, damn it! Or maybe it’s not that I’m too cynical, but that I want games to be less cynical. I want the joy and whimsy of being an octopus in Darwin’s Paradox!, the bright neons and sunlit pastels of Split Fiction, the thematic creativity of Dreams of Another - yet while these were all present, they felt like exceptions to Sony’s rule on game design.
I don’t want another game where I have to kill things or people in a sad, grimy, moody setting, I want to experience the joy that games like Astro Bot give me. I want to have fun, to be in awe of a game’s creativity, to have environments that are a feast for the eyes because they’re so open and beautiful. Unfortunately, this State of Play didn’t serve up all that much of that, and it’s left me even more cynical about what’s to come.
